The future of paid media — John Readman // BOSCO

Quotes

• “It depends on how futuristic you wanna go. I once was talking about someone who has facial recognition and they’re gonna build this into the billboards and the billboards are gonna be digital apps.” - John“Totally, Vanilla Sky.” - Ben “Yeah and I’ve seen the technology and arguably you could connect it all together and there were visions on the tube in London that each art that you’re looking at is gonna be different. So, it’s personalized, focuses on me and gives me an amazing offer, I wouldn’t mind.” - John  “Sounds terrifying to me.” - Ben “In the immediate term, if you think about the devices that we now interact with, the biggest challenge for marketing used to be ‘one device, multiple people’ and now we got ‘multiple devices, one person’.” - John“The future of paid marketing is about understanding what content your audience is absorbing and interacting with and then showing that you get your media in front of the audience. Fundamentally, to have a really well optimized paid marketing go forward, you need really good first party quality data on your prospects.” - John “See, I’m torn here because I could make a case that says, ‘Hey, we’re gonna get better at multi-touch attribution. We’re gonna get better at targeting and whether it’s on Facebook or OTT, it’s not gonna matter. You’re just gonna be targeting an individual person who you think has a high propensity to buy and we’re gonna be relatively platform-agnostic because multi-touch attribution is gonna be solved.” - Ben“On the flip side, there’s all this privacy concerns and GDPR, CCPA, the world is starting to realize the power of the data that they are sharing with companies. And I think there’s gonna be restrictions and legislations around how data is used and there’s gonna be more consumer privacies in place.” - Ben “I think people need to understand what value they’re getting from a lot of these technology platforms for free and that’s precisely I’m in two hats. I’m a consumer and I see how these targeting platforms hit me. Facebook is definitely listening all the time on my phone. Absolutely convinced about that. So there are privacy concerns.” - John“But I think people will want to ensure that they are getting good value or maybe there's a model out there now where people are gonna be basically served with their own data, or opt-in to a privacy program that protects them from the overall.” - John“Yeah, I’m torn. To me, the ad-supported internet is not gonna go away. We’re gonna lose cookies. We’re gonna lose these tracking identifiers at some point and there’s gonna a new technology that comes out that replaces them.” - Ben “It was like what everybody said when the cookie law came in and the whole internet is gonna stop. But we don’t really read so we just click.” - John “I think the future of paid marketing, as long as there is demand and there’s products, and people want to get a good value, there will be a market that exists.” - John“I’m interested longer term on the ethics around the green element of it personally. The green element is actually, ‘Do I need all the stuff? As somebody who runs a business and encourages people to spend money and advertising to people to sell stuff, I probably shouldn’t be thinking that we only need to buy less stuff.” - John“If the value for the customer has changed, I think the value of the media changes and the device of how you interact with that media. I think ultimately where people need to get to is customer lifetime value. You can only do that by offering really good customer service, measuring that data over time and then you can understand, “where does my paid media fit in my future strategy vs what we talked about last on organic content.” - John“But I think there will always be someone who wants a shortcut and instant hit. There will always be a place for paid media but like I said it’s understanding your metrics and how you stack up against your peers.” - John“I think that online marketing is not gonna go away. There’s always gonna be a world where people can promote their services by buying media. What my prediction for the future is, understanding what purchase media is, is going to be confusing. We’re already in a world where influencers are promoting products and services and you can’t really tell what’s an influencer’s decision and what’s a paid ad.” - Ben“There’s all sorts of grey area and I think that’s a trend that’s going to continue. We’re gonna be influenced so much by the world around us and there’s gonna be value exchange for people that have access and reach that are significant on these platforms as opposed to just the actual advertising platform.” - Ben “I don’t think that it will always be through traditional online media advertising tools. I think we might be seeing more of a shift towards the individual influencers getting compensated as opposed to platforms.” - Ben “BOSCO fits into three chunks and the first part of this is the BOSCO Index. They will download a report and they will get a score on how competitive and how effective they are against their peers in that particular category.” - John“The other part as well, if I got a 500,000 (UK$) to spend online, where should I spend it? What BOSCO does is it looks at available demand versus your budget, versus your competitors and basically tells you which channel presents the best opportunities for you.” - John“There’s a lite version which gives you this third-party data predictor or you can have the full version, the connect version which can integrate and connect with your data to predict which channels are gonna give you the greatest return right now, next week, next quarter and then it will also indicate and take into account seasonality.” - John